Before midnight comes

Mielőtt eljön borító netre 1

„(…) In the meantime, there was already no transmission on the Tv, the appliance quietly and evenly hissed. For a while. Because with a soft pop the picture went dark, and the appliance which was fixed to the ceiling turned off. It went off just like that, all by itself. It cracked  a few times as the tube cooled off. This was followed by silent silence for a few moments. It was the silence of the movies: hard and scary. The music started to play at about the same time.It was playing softly, but it was playing still. He looked around, as if he had just woken from a bad dream. He blinked a few times, of course, he did not know where he was all of a sudden. Then he came to. He really did come to his senses! His heart was jumping up and down in his stomach, then it started to beat in his throat, when he realized what is happening. A drop of sweat started to drip down from his forehead.He smoothed back his hair, and slowly got up from the sofa. The remote control of the tv fell to the floor with a soft click. He gave it just a cursory glance, then headed towards the door.His hand stood still on the door’s handle. Yes, the music was clearly audible, just like before. The only difference was that these…these are the  typical  guitar sounds of „Sleepwalk”. Unmistakeable. He had heard it a thousand times over, and of course he had played it as well. He cannot possibly mix it up with anything else. He turned on the lights in the hall with a trembling hand, and opened the door at the same time. The minute the door opened, the music stopped too. The last sound of the guitar played for a second still with the silence of the hall, but then this was lost too. Jack let go of the door’s handle, straightened himself, and stepped out into the storage room. He glanced back into the office, then looked back at his ca, and he started to walk ahead, right under the light of the highly placed middle row of lamps.The gave everything the once-over, but everything was still and quiet. Only his footsteps clicked,  a mixture of age-old oil mud and fine dust creaked under his shoes.He went past the small Gremlin, the Chrysler, the plane, the Impala , the bus, all the other cars, the packages, boxes and all other things stood in front of him, all disciplined and ranked like soldiers. Nothing happened here, and nothing is going to happen here at all.He stood in the hall and shook his head in a funny way as a lamp cast full light on it, throwing a funny shadow next to him, and he laughed out loud. He put his hands in his pocket, and started to walk back to the office. He smiled as he once again looked at the machines resting in the storage room.No music, and nothing else either, this is all it was. His stupid dreams, and his soaring imagination, nothing more. This is a desolate storage room, nothing else, and…and…

He noticed it and stopped. His smile froze. Slowly, very slowly his smile changed to a curve. He pulled out his hands from his pockets, and started to wring his fingers in an embarrassed way, then wiped his perspiring hands on the back pocket of his trousers. He pressed  his mouth together, and tried to stay calm, as calm as it was possible to be in this situation. He took uncertain steps towards the plane. He stood in front of it and he just stared at the old Beech Bonanza. His hands started to shake more and more. He began to sweat profusely, he began to feel the cold drops of sweat dripping dowm his spine.His wide-open eyes targeted the plane. Barely visibly he shook his head, and said softly, almost in a whisper: no, this cannot be. Impossible. I was here not so long ago. It was covered up to its neck in dust. The key word in the story was the word „was”. Because the plane, the Beech Bonanza left here since ages, or  which suddenly appeared here out of the blue,  is now anything but dusty, it was glitzy and shiny. Its orange, red and white coat of paint almost shone in the light of the lamps.It was was a wonderful sight. Or rather, it could have been a wonderful sight in a different situation. The windows of the plane were so clean, that he tended to believe that they weren’t even there.

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